Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

She rose to welcome them, moving around them as she did to get the light out of her eyes, which is when she saw his, and when she realised what the doctor’s wife had meant. He looked down at her as the Bishop introduced them, and Mrs Cole looked back at him. They were blue, but she had seen blue eyes before. Her husband’s eyes were blue; but his were nothing like these. It was as if Cripps had been facing a low sun which had somehow left its evening light in his irises: an opal iridescence with flecks of fool’s gold around the pupils, floating, deep and black, adrift in their mineral waters.

Mrs Cole had also invited the Reverend Holt and his wife, who arrived shortly after the Bishop and Cripps. She had never liked or trusted Holt, who was another missionary, but of a different breed to the Bishop or, she felt, Cripps. His work in Africa was funded by a group of religiomaniacs back in England whom Holt kept informed with a regular supply of exaggerated and skewed tales of Rhodesian life in return for his healthy income. He expressed his successes in figures: 800 Bibles distributed, 370 baptised, sixty more of those confirmed and 2,000 on the roll for mission schools. It made Mrs Cole suspicious of him, a man whose spiritual work read like balance sheets, but she could not have avoided inviting him tonight.

They took their drinks on the veranda, Cripps taking a lime juice instead of a whisky and soda. Then they retired to the small brick dining room, where Mrs Cole’s maid and house boy served impala steaks that she had bought from a hunter just that week. To her surprise Cripps politely declined the steaks on the grounds of being a vegetarian, and accepted a hastily-cooked cob of mealie corn instead. Mrs Cole was momentarily thrown, her careful preparations shattered on the rocks of this bizarre preference, but she did take some enjoyment in the Holts’ raised eyebrows and shared disapproving glance. To follow, the maid served sweet wine and sour apples, which, Mrs Cole was relieved to see, Cripps did accept despite his earlier refusal of a drink.

They ate, drank and the evening went as evenings like that always had done. A swing of conversation and silences, politenesses, compliments, a lot spoken, little said, and almost nothing which was not tempered by the situation. Father Cripps did not keep within these boundaries as much as the others, but he did not speak often either, and when he did it was with a soft, halting voice that did little to assert itself beyond the words that it carried. His thoughts appeared to come at him from many directions; he often stopped a sentence midway and jumped onto another and he peppered his speech with the phrase ‘I mean’, although he never seemed in any doubt about exactly what he meant.

Mrs Cole observed him as they all went through the motions. He was not what she had been expecting at all. She thought him somewhat untidy; his khaki suit was crumpled and worn, and looked as though it needed a wash. He himself looked as though he needed a wash, although his clerical collar was a clean, brilliant white. Physically, he was obviously lit, and she noticed his strong neck, its mobile muscle and veins under a taut skin. And yet he did not seem at ease with his body, as if his arms and legs were just too long, and he did not know where to put them when still. The Bishop had said he was thirty-one years old, only four years younger than herself, but he could have been even younger again. His face was clean-shaven, and sometimes, when he was listening, it betrayed a youthfulness not apparent on first meeting. And he seemed shy. He was neither the trouble-maker nor the zealous priest he had been painted as, but appeared rather to be simply an earnest man who was still working things out.

Mrs Cole sensed a mothering instinct rise in her when she thought of him like this. Or maybe it was another instinct, because she still saw, despite his shyness and his dishevelled appearance, what the doctor’s wife had also noticed in him. A certain magnetism, an interest about him that held the eye, unlike someone like Holt, whom the eye slid off as easily as if he were just another stone on the ground. She also found an attractiveness in his serious nature that could suddenly break to a smile and laughter, in the conviction of what he said, and of course in his eyes, which seemed to speak of a longer life than he could possibly have yet lived. He was obviously close to the Bishop, and this friendship was in itself another attractive quality. Mrs Cole liked the gruff little Bishop, and she liked the way the two men worked together, almost like a father and son, with an unspoken understanding passing between them even when they were silent, listening to Reverend Holt recite his numbers game.

Above all, though, Mrs Cole liked Father Cripps because she liked herself when she talked to him. Once she had broken through his shell of reticence they had talked quite freely, and she found his views refreshing. There was none of the anxious arrogance she had encountered in other missionaries, the conviction that godliness was won through a white man’s way of life, and all the taxes that went with it. He seemed new, yet open to Africa, and especially open to her people. Mrs Cole found herself engaging parts of her mind that seemed stubborn and rusted with misuse. He made her think, and talk, and he listened to her. It was something a man had not done with her for such a long time, and for the first time in years she recognised herself again.

And that is why she was disappointed. That is why she had stood outside her house and looked out into the darkness long after they had all left, and why she stayed there as the clouds opened and brought the rain, sheeting down over the tin roofs of Salisbury. Not because the evening she had looked forward to and prepared for was over. Not because she would miss the Bishop or Father Cripps, or the general company. But because Cripps had made her recognise herself once more, and unless she could retain that feeling, she would miss that woman. She had enjoyed having her back.

Arthur watched from a distance as the young Mashona man gathered the loose skin of the bull’s throat. He pulled it taut with one hand while firmly pressing a thin-bladed knife into the hard hide and muscle of the animal’s neck with the other. As he did this he bent close to where the knife’s point made contact with the skin, his face fixed in a concentrated frown while his friend, who held the animal’s large, angular head in a rope halter, looked on. Its wet nostrils fumed in the early morning air. All three of them were still for a moment in this position, a frozen tableau, but then the elbow of the young man’s arm jerked forward a fraction and the bull flinched and raised its head in response. A pearl of blood grew at the apex of metal and skin. The young man kept his pressure on the knife, gently twisting the handle from side to side, as delicately as if he were piercing a loved one’s ear. Arthur could see the tendons and stringy muscle of his forearm working over the bone with each turn of his wrist. As he twisted the knife he bent down even closer to where the blade entered the skin, turning his head to the side as he did so, listening for the almost inaudible hiss which would tell him he has gone far enough. It comes, and withdrawing the tip of the blade in one smooth action he picks up the calabash bowl at his feet just in time to catch the first arc of black-red blood spurting from the punctured vein. He keeps his other hand at the wound, coaxing the blood through the skin. It is early morning and cold, the mists that have lain on the ground all night are still dispersing and the blood steams in the bowl as it fills.

Arthur has seen this cattle-bleeding before, but it still fascinates him. He likes to think of it as a kind of African Eucharist, a literal translation, although he knows it is more practical than that, performed for the body not the soul, gleaning the animal’s protein while keeping it alive for another day’s work. After a couple of minutes the bull’s eyes waver in their sockets and its knees give then recover like those of a dozing midday sleeper. The young man holding the animal’s head says something to the calabash holder. He speaks quickly and urgently. The other man places the large bowl on the ground in response. As he does this he tries to follow the pulsing arc of blood, which rises and falls with the bull’s heartbeat, until the bowl is at his feet again but still catching the hot liquid, which gulps and falls down the animal’s neck, red against its dun hide. His hands free, he bends and picks the leaf of a plant which he places over the wound, pressing it to the puncture in the bull’s neck with both his hands. The sound of the blood flowing into the bowl stops. A bird calls from one of the trees and somewhere a woman is singing. Only now do the two young men turn to Arthur, as if it is only in this new silence they have noticed him. They are both naked except for scraps of blue limbo tied around their waists covering their genitals. They must be no older than seventeen or eighteen. The young man pressing the leaf to the wound takes a hand away and waves to Arthur. ‘ Mangwanani ishe .’